For a long long time--maybe all my life--I've had trouble saying the word "God." I really don't know why. When I say it, I feel my voice hesitate or drop in volume.

"God," when voiced, feels blade-sharp, hot, naked, or raw like a steaming wound. It doesn't feel comfortable or familiar to me. It feels explosive, elemental, like I'm unleashing something when I say it. When I say it, I suddenly feel like I have no idea what I'm talking about, like I've lost control. As if talking about him treads dangerous ground.

And yet, when I hear it, it is like a soft, rich ointment. Once in meeting, a woman stood up to lead us in a beautiful chant. It was simply the phrase "Be still and know that I am God," repeated on a single note. On each repetition, the timing and rhythm of the phrase would be shifted. Simple, plain, hypnotic, pure. I feel water when I hear the word "God;" it's like oceans, waterfalls, lakes, streams, clouds, rain, blood, tears.

Why should voicing the word "God" feel so dangerous, but hearing it feel so soft? What is it about releasing this word from my body into aural space? What is it about receiving it from aural space into my body?

Practice: For once, watch the sun rise. And be outside when it happens. Perhaps that will mean sleeping outside; I recommend this, because you will feel the cool dampness of the night evaporate off your body as the light grows warmer.

This is what will happen: at first, silence. There is a deep, vast, quivering silence that envelops the first moments of dawn, as if the world is holding its breath, waiting for the sun. The sky and the earth and everything around will be slightly monochromatic, in varying shades and tints of blue and gray. Everything will seem gently luminous. As the light increases, the dew on the grass around you will release cool fragrances.

And now wait. There is nothing like this waiting. The world grows lighter, the grass more fragrant, and the dew slowly dissipates into the wetness of the air. There is nothing but you, waiting in the quietness of the globe.

And then BAM: the first sliver of sun breaks over the horizon. It is always more intensely orange than you could ever have imagined. It is like something dangerous and red-hot, fresh from a blacksmith's fire. And you'll feel it. The heat will shoot straight for the marrow in your bones.

As it lifts above the soil, you'll have to squint and then avert your eyes. Strange that something so omnipresent and taken-for-granted should be something so powerful that we can't even look at it.

Easter

A few housemates and I were sitting around the dinner table on Good Friday.  It seemed to be “ask the medievalist” ( or “ask the Christian”?) time, so I found myself explaining the meaning of Holy Week.  I explained that we don’t actually know when the crucifixion and resurrection took place, but that this was the week in which the church has chosen to remember them.   There’s no reason to doubt that the time in which Easter is celebrated is connected to some kind of ancient pagan spring festival.  The pagan connection is one major reason that Quakers have historically chosen not to recognize conventional holy days.

And yet, the Easter-Spring connection really speaks to me.  I grew up in a tiny ethnic Presbyterian church, almost exclusively Japanese-American (plus a few Chinese-, Korean-, and Euro-Americans sprinkled in via marriage, and my own Creole/Choctaw mother, also there via marriage).  Our church building was humble, and my childhood experience of the space was shaped by dark wood and ancient forest-green carpeting.  In the back of the sanctuary hung a banner featuring the Japanese character for “grace,” executed decades ago by the best calligraphist our congregation could produce.  In the front, a pulpit, a brass cross, a little electric organ, and a few pieces of raku pottery for serving communion.  Simple, intimate, and maybe even a little rough-hewn.  But every year, come Easter, I remember a very distinct explosion.

In the yard outside the sanctuary, surrounded by quivering Chinese elms and a black metal fence keeping us children from traipsing into the street, the ladies would be putting the finishing touches on a huge wooden cross covered entirely with flowers.  Before the start of service, this cross would take center stage amid a veritable Tabernacle Choir of radiant potted lilies.  The sanctuary seemed to be overflowing, bursting at the seams with flowers.  Even the congregation would be flowery in pastels and floral prints.  My dad had a floral tie.

To me, Easter and flowers are very strongly connected.  I find this good.  It reminds me that Easter isn't only about a resurrection that took place two millenia ago.  Rather, it commemorates the resurrections that occur daily, every moment.  The world is constantly recycling and renewing itself;  in fact, resurrection is the very way God works.  Yes, Christ came back from the dead.  But so does everything else.

Every year, I go up to Northern California to visit the redwoods.  Standing thickly together, they give the impression of silent strength, timelessness, and eternity.  But sooner or later, these ancient behemoths fall.  When they do, however, they don't just lie on the earth dead, dry, and drained of sap.  In nature, God doesn't waste a single thing.  Soon, mosses and lichens spread out over the valleyed bark.  Tiny spores send out translucent green lobes that bloom into ferns.  Seeds arrive mysteriously, sprout, and branch upwards:  huckleberry, bay laurel, poison oak.  In the moist and verdant redwood forests, death seems nonexistent;  there is no time or place for the dead because new life immediately takes over.

It is the same with human death.  After the heart stops pumping human life through the body, the body begins its transformation into moist, nourishing soil.  This soil is soon penetrated by the tender roots of plants.  Who knows?  Perhaps a fallen, moss-covered redwood tree may once have been nourished by human soil.  When you take a step back from it all, these transformations really have nothing to do with death.  This is encouraging, because we humans sure have a knack for causing death.  The lesson of Easter is that nothing stops at death, because God resurrects.  Redwoods erupt in ferns.  Human mortality erupts in flowers.  Emotional wounds heal.  Blighted neighborhoods discover community.  Estranged friends are reconciled.  People begin to sow love and light and life.  

I recently passed by a wide expanse of concrete, and discovered in a crack at its edge two tiny purple flowers springing from two tiny tufts of green.  My friend knows of an abandoned, overgrown orchard in the mountains near her home that provides her with stone fruit in the summer.  Everyday resurrections.  To me, Christ's resurrection wasn't a miracle but a revelation.  It revealed what was really a very simple fact of the universe:  God works through resurrection.  And now the challenge of Easter is, can we work through resurrection too?

Practice:  When someone is speaking to you, try to pay attention to your body language.  How can you communicate that you are listening?  I don't mean that you insert "uh-huh" or "I know what you mean" or tales from your own life experiences.  Rather, without any need for verbal cues, can you be an attentive, generous, and deep listener with your entire body?

Perhaps you can try leaning forward slightly.  Let your eyes be gentle and receptive.  What are you doing with your arms and hands?  Do they hide you, block you, or close you off?  Or are they welcoming?  

Strive for openness and hospitality.  Welcome the speaker with your body language.  Allow them to speak to you, in their own words.  Try to absorb their words, as well as the source of their words and that which transcends all words.  Bathe in the sheer power and beauty of their presence.

Intellectualizing

Meeting last week was so good. As people delivered their messages about prayer and light, I found myself deeply and restoratively in a prayerful state. And I found it. I found that place within me that I could hear that still, small voice. I don't know what I was expecting, but it surprised me--it was so clear. It actually sounded like a little child, and it addressed me by name: "Stephen, come to me."

When I have a message that needs to be delivered, my body reacts strongly. The message presses into me from within, my heart starts pounding, I shudder and grow cold, and my head grows light and floaty and swirly. Last week, that happened when I had something to say about the light of God. But the child's voice I'd heard wasn't in it. My body trembled and my head grew faint, but the voice wasn't there. I remained seated.

Tonight, I have another meeting of the newly-formed Young Adult Friends group for Providence. Last Monday night was our first real meeting, and there were five of us, gathered over tea, tortilla chips, flatbread, and homemade hummous and pico de gallo. We decided to do a little bible study, so we opened up to a psalm and read it aloud. I mentioned that I sometimes had trouble reconciling the language of "enemies" in the psalms with Jesus' exhortation to love our enemies. I wondered what everyone thought. People shared their thoughts, and they mostly made some sense to me. Then, suddenly, I came upon a revelation: it all seemed so clear. But as I opened my mouth to speak, Hannah's cell phone rang. It was her father, so she answered it, briefly. After she hung up, I didn't say anything. But Elizabeth had noticed my "revelation face," and invited me to say what I was going to say. I couldn't.

I believe that seemingly random things happen for a reason. During the phone call, I realized that I had done to the scriptures what I usually do as a grad student: I had intellectualized them into obedience to my will. My "revelation" was an intellectual epiphany. The spirit wasn't in it. So I shut my mouth and let the silence of waiting enfold us all again. I've done bible studies many, many times in my life, especially during my high school days in a Presbyterian youth group. But this was the first time I realized how much God can and should be present in them. In the past, they've all been intellectual exercises, in which we talked about God. I realized that we can actually experience God directly when we communally wait upon the scriptures just like we wait upon him.

We didn't come to any glorious revelations about the psalm that night, but that was okay. We just sat with it, and we found ourselves in a prayerful state that was sweeter than anything we could have done to wrangle that thing into making sense.

I noticed something in meeting this morning.  Sometimes, I find it hard to focus during meeting, and my mind wanders uncontrollably (I think of what Buddhists call shin-en, "monkey mind"--that's totally what I have).  I sit in meeting trying to calm it down, but it cavorts all over the place, chattering and shrieking despite my best efforts.  Vocal ministry comes and goes, but it's difficult for me to pay attention.  Sometimes, I even find it hard to stay awake.  So I try different techniques gleaned from my days of practicing meditation in high school:  changing my posture, visualizing, chanting some sound in my mind.  All this in an attempt to calm down my monkey mind.

But the past few weeks, meetings have been uniformly focused and worshipful.  I've been blessed to consistently find myself in a deep, luxurious and prayerful state.  I've been profoundly moved by the vocal ministry, but not necessarily by the things that are said.  I've truly felt where the words are coming from.  I was startled this morning to hear the booming voice of God thundering from the throat of a woman who stood to talk about the prophet Jeremiah.  She herself became a prophetess in that moment.  Her voice was like a bullhorn.  

This morning, I realized what the difference was.  The past few weeks, I've begun meeting for worship with prayer.  I simply speak to God, feeling him out, opening up to him with words.  I ask him explicitly to come bless us with his presence.  I ask him to come and sit among us, and I picture the meeting room covered with Spirit.  I don't really know how to describe this, but I see it covered over with something that looks like swirling water.  It's gentle, luminous, and clear.  I don't say "Amen" or anything like that to end the prayer;  instead of ending it, I allow it to feather out and diffuse.  When I begin with prayer, meetings for worship have been profoundly sweet.

Is that all it takes?  All I have to do is ask?  I don't need any tricks and techniques to enter a prayerful state, but only an open invitation, asking God to come and be present?  

Evangelism: "come and see"

I just read this excerpt on another blog and it so powerfully spoke to my condition that I had to put it here as well. It's from Bryan Stone's Evangelism after Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness:

Christian evangelism, as I will argue throughout this book, is pacifist in every way. The good news is, as Isaiah said, the good news of "peace." But this peace is not only the content and substance of evangelism, it is its very form. Christian evangelism refuses every violent means of converting others to that peace, whether that violence is cultural, military, political, spiritual, or intellectual. Evangelism requires only the peaceable simplicity of an offer and an invitation to "come and see" (John 1:46).

The practice of evangelism, I believe, inescapably counters and disarms the world's powerful practices by unmasking the narratives that sustain them and by offering a story and a people that are peaceful and beautiful. The gospel can, therefore, be good news again in our world. But only if in Christ something new in the world has been made possible and the Holy Spirit present--something both disturbing and inviting, a salvation in the form of a new story, a "new humanity," a new peoplehood.